Land sale revenues in April (RMB 27 billion) were down -54.7%
compared to April last year

Foreign funding for property development was down -91.4% in
March and -80.8% in April, compared to the same months last year.

Clearly a crash is underway. The above stats also show the
soft-landing thesis is written on toilet paper.

GDP Analysis

I like the analysis by Chovanec on GDP implications and the
highly-overrated "soft landing" theory.

The “resilient” growth in real estate investment that seemed to
promise a “soft landing” is not very resilient at all. It’s more
like the last gasp of a market that’s running out of steam. Once
the surge in completions plays out, the declining number of new
starts will become the pipeline, and growth in property
investment will flatten or go negative.

Property investment accounts for roughly a quarter of gross Fixed
Asset Investment (FAI), and net FAI accounts for over half of
China’s GDP growth. As I noted in January, in a back-of-the-envelope
thought exercise, if property investment plateaus (growth falls
to zero), it could shave as much as 2.6 percentage points off of
real GDP growth. If it fell 10% (in real, not nominal terms)
it could bring GDP growth down to 5.3%.

At the time I first saw this dynamic in the data, when the Q1
numbers came out, I figured it would take several months to begin
playing out. But the April numbers suggest it is already
happening.

Chovanec notes if real estate investment drops by 10%, GDP will
come in at 5.3%. What if real estate investment falls by 20% or
25%? Moreover, why shouldn't it?

The longer China puts off rebalancing its economy, the bigger the
crash later on. Moreover, widening the band on its currency is a
needed part of that rebalancing, and does not preclude in any way
a huge slowdown in growth.

The structural imbalances in China are large and for now, still
growing. However, huge cracks have appeared in real estate, and
changes are coming up with a regime change. Finally, peak oil
alone makes many of the growth estimates we have seen for China
outright impossible.